Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [68]
But while Taylor sees positive illusions as tools to ward off dysfunction, stress, and bad health, not everyone agrees. Philosopher David Jopling calls such illusions “life-lies.” He argues that so-called positive illusions may work for a while but collapse when reality becomes too harsh and intrudes on the dream world.
“The deeper and more pervasive an individual’s positive illusions,” writes Jopling, “the greater their effect of diminishing his range of awareness of himself, other people, and the situation confronting him.” Jopling argues that self-deception strategies are reality filters that organize what people understand into self-relevant and self-serving packages. “With the diminishing of the range of awareness comes a corresponding diminishing of the range of responsiveness and openness” to what is real. One’s ability to interact intelligently with all of the world’s real consequences diminishes.
Jopling warns of grave moral consequences for a delusional society. “This means that the range of social, emotional, and personal relations that connect us to others, to the social world, and to our own humanity, are progressively weakened as self-deceptive strategies become progressively entrenched in behavior and thought.”11
Psychology has a long history of lending its services to the military and government as well as propaganda industries such as advertising, public relations, and human management. The National Institute of Mental Health, from which many positive psychologists have generous grants, though a public institution, has numerous government, military, and commercial relationships .12
Keltner is the author of Born to be Good: The Science of the Meaningful Life. He is also executive editor of The Greater Good, a magazine, and director of The Greater Good Science Center on the Berkeley campus. He teaches a course on happiness at the university and hosts motivational workshops on “building compassion, creating well-being.” He has had his ears rubbed by the Dalai Lama.13
Keltner sits in his office in Berkeley’s Tolman Hall. Students wait in the hallway for an appointment. He is dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and sweatshirt with Berkeley’s blue background with gold stripes.
When asked whether positive psychology could be used for mass coercion, Keltner replies: “As scientists our task is to describe human nature as well as we can. So the motivations of positive psychology are well founded. There are branches of our nervous system that we study in our lab that are really mysteries scientifically. The vagus nerve, oxytocin, parts of the brain that are involved in compassion. That’s our first task, and that’s the scientific motivation of positive psychology. And then cultures and societies and communities take science and push it in a lot of different directions. [Charles] Darwin had a theory about human nature that was very sanguine. He said we are a sympathetic species, we take care of others, we are inherently cooperative, and then [Herbert] Spencer, and social Darwinists, and libertarians pushed it in all sorts of directions, in the service of their versions of public policies. . . . So you always have to separate science from practice. And you can’t critique the science based on the practices that follow. Nazism was an application of a lot of scientific ideas that have nothing to do with the science.”
The theme of the most recent issue of The Greater Good is “The Psychology of Power.” It exposes in scenario after scenario the true purpose of positive psychology—how to manipulate people to do what you want.
The magazine has an article called “Peaceful Parenting,” in which two practitioners explain “how to turn parent-child conflict into cooperation.” The article begins: “It’s nine o’clock on a school night and twelve-year-old Jessie is absorbed in his favorite video game—until his mother comes into his bedroom and announces it’s bedtime.”
“I don